“Strange captaincy”: Michael Vaughan criticizes Rishabh Pant for not bowling out Kuldeep Yadav despite impressive performance vs KKR in IPL 2022

Michael Vaughan criticizes Rishabh Pant for not completing Kuldeep Yadav’s quota of Overs despite another impressive performance against KKR.

During the 41st match of the ongoing 15th season of the Indian Premier League at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, the Delhi Capitals (DC) put on an impressive show with the ball as they restricted Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) to mere 146/9 after 20 Overs as skipper Rishabh Pant opted to field first.

The Shreyas Iyer-led side got off to a poor start as they lost both their openers – Aaron Finch (3 off 7) and Venkatesh Iyer (6 off 12) early on as they registered their lowest Powerplay score – 29/2, in the season so far.

Just when KKR needed to rebuild their innings, DC’s left-arm spinner Kuldeep Yadav started breathing fire right away since his introduction into the attack, as he dismissed debutant Baba Indrajith (6 off 8) and Sunil Narine (0 off 1) off successive deliveries to announce his arrival against his former franchise in some style.

Then, in his third Over, with Shreyas Iyer (42 off 37) looking to up the ante a bit after spending significant time at the crease, Kuldeep struck again off the very first delivery to dismiss the KKR skipper.

If this was not it, a couple of deliveries later, he also stumped the in-form and ever dangerous Andre Russell (0 off 3) to rattle to DC batting order as the scorecard read 85/6 after 14 Overs.

However, with Yadav having a perfect opportunity to bag a rare five-wicket haul in the format, Pant decided not to complete his quota of Overs as the KKR innings finished with his bowling figures reading 3-0-14-4, at an Economy rate of 4.7 rpo.

Michael Vaughan criticizes Rishabh Pant

Unimpressed and surprised by DC skipper Rishabh Pant’s tactics in play, former England batter and captain Michael Vaughan took to his Twitter handle to question his captaincy decision to not bowl Kuldeep’s complete quota of Overs, despite his impressive bowling figures.

Pant, in fact handed the 16th Over of the innings to the part-time off-spinner Lalit Yadav (3-0-32-0), who was tonked for 17 runs in the Over.

With the left-handed Nitish Rana (57 off 34) batting at ease, Pant might have decided to hand an extra Over to Lalit, but perhaps failed to perceive the ease with which Rana operates against the off-spinner.

Off the 4 Sixes that Rana hit in his innings, 3 came off Lalit, as the former handed his side a respectable total with a crucial half-century knock.

As for Kuldeep, he had bagged a four-fer in DC’s previous match against KKR as well in the ongoing season.